Dawn interview with Mohsin Hamid on Lahore, Lollywood, class, and Pakistan's future (February 20, 2009)
Flash Forward with Mohsin Hamid
Mohsin Hamid, author of the widely acclaimed novels Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, has been described as a man who tells it like it is. Here, he weighs in on Lahore, Lollywod, class, and Pakistan’s future.
Q. Which novel or poem currently in print best describes Pakistan's future?
A: Future? No idea, sadly. As for the past, there are many...
Q. Several years from now, will Lahoris recognize the city you describe in Moth Smoke?
A. I think so. When I wrote Moth Smoke, many people told me they didn't recognize that world of drugs, frustration, simmering conflict. I don't hear that complaint much any more.
Q. Will the fundamentalists remain reluctant?
A. Some will, some won't, and some people the world thinks of as fundamentalists aren't fundamentalists at all. Some of them are romantics, idealists, bullies, thugs, sadists, or killers – but not fundamentalists. They don't proceed from religious fundamentals. They proceed from personal desire.
Q. In the next decade or so, where will Pakistan's Obama come from?
A. Race isn't as charged an issue in Pakistan. Class is. A president who was genuinely poor, a factory worker or a servant, say, now that would be an audacious hope.
Q. You meet Suketu Metha (author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found) at a literary conference several years from now. What do you two talk about?
A. Suketu's a close friend of mine. We talk about the vegetarian food my mother made for him when he stayed with us in Lahore back in '04, and the party he threw for me when I stayed with him in New York in '08. And we talk about his theory that the world isn't divided between rich and poor, or West and East, or Hindu and Muslim, or men and women, but between people who have kids and people who don't.
Q. If you're still in London several years from now, why didn't you move to Lahore, Karachi, or Islamabad?
A. Because I was an idiot.
Q. In 2015, lobbyists from across the Pakistani diaspora invite you to write a manifesto on their behalf. What does it declare?
A. It declares nations are illusions constructed to perpetuate discrimination. Passports are the new apartheid. Let's open borders and open minds. Subtitle: Humans are Pakistanis.
Q. Several years from now, you decide to take a child on a tour of Pakistan – where do you start?
A. In Lahore, at whatever then stands on the site of my grandfather's house.
Q. A decade from now, you're commissioned by the Pakistani government to pen a grand, national epic. What's its title?
A. The title is: Why I Find It Impossible To Accept Government Commissions.
Q. Why are Pakistanis avidly reading your next book?
A. Ha! That's a tough one. Hopefully because I've ripped out a piece of myself and put it on paper and they can feel that when they read it.
Q. Can you see a Pakistan in which your fiction is banned?
A. I can see it. I don't want to believe it will ever happen, though. It would be like a mother trying to sew her child's lips shut because she thought she heard him swear.
Q. You take a break from fiction to pen the script for a Punjabi blockbuster. How does the plot unfold?
A. In an operations center, deep below Heera Mandi in Lahore, a fat man with a moustache receives his briefing. He is a scecret agent, code-name Suth Panja, and his mission, if he chooses to accept it, is to infiltrate India and kidnap the one man who can revitalize Lollywood...
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